Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Bad news and good news. The forum is back

The bad news is that I expected that on July 20th new photos from Panoramio were going to be added to Google Earth, but I was wrong. I am deeply sorry for that. The next update will be around August 15th.

The good news. The forum is finally back. Yes, it has been a too long delay, almost two months. The forum was disabled until we could update to a more secure version. It was supposed to be something very fast, but because the forum was integrated with Panoramio accounts it was not that fast. Then some other urgent issues appeared and delayed the work in the forum. In this wonderful world you know when you start something, but not when you can finish it. Anyway, now the forum is back with more forums and some changes.

As you can imagine moving to Zurich and working in a new place delays some things, but the acquisition by Google already brought some very good things:

- Now we can know the date of the next update to Google Earth in advance. Thus we can tell to you when your photos will be included in Google Earth and the status of each photo in Google Earth (selected, rejected or in waiting list). Those were the very frequent asked questions by the people and I am very happy that I can finally answer them. We have also re-written some parts of the help page.

- Panoramio infrastructure is more robust now. The upload system is working much better and the number of people having trouble uploading photos dropped dramatically. You can also explore the World with Panoramio's map more smoothly.